


The Jerk

by gardnerhill



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Cultural Appropriation, Day of the Dead, Episode: e025 One Year Later, M/M, Native American Character(s), One Year Later, Post One Year Later, Post-Episode: e025 One Year Later
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-09
Updated: 2013-11-09
Packaged: 2018-01-01 00:20:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1038111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gardnerhill/pseuds/gardnerhill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Honoring the dead, even if the deceased is a problematically racist jerk; also, the trouble with saving someone’s life in Night Vale.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Jerk

**Author's Note:**

> Story in the fandom of the podcast "Welcome to Night Vale" ([the podcast can be found here](http://podbay.fm/show/536258179)).
> 
> Spoilers for the infamous WTNV Episode 25, “One Year Later.” Canonical death of a recurring character.

Cecil had been bemused when Carlos had set up the altar and told him why – “You just have _one_?” – but he’d been happy to help collect what was needed.

The picture of the deceased was courtesy of the Sheriff’s Secret Police. Some SSP officers had become brilliant amateur photographers through sheer repetition; the image perfectly captured the subject’s smug air of borrowed wisdom as well as the plastic seams on the fake eagle feathers on the Plains war-bonnet slouched over his blond hair, Native Spirit cigarette dangling from his lips as he leaned against his car.

The injunctions against wheat (as well as its by-products) meant a flat, bricky Pan de Muerto made from tapioca and potato flour; at least the candied fruits had been painless to acquire, as were candles and flowers (the marigolds that quietly wept were clearly a local offshoot). Not surprisingly, there were no sugar skulls for sale at the Ralphs – and he did not want to buy one of the real skulls grinning in the **Decoys and Produce** section; he wasn’t sure he was ready to investigate that one.

The figurine had been easy enough – skeletal figures came free with most Night Vale cereals. A headdress cut away from a plastic Indian toy completed the figure’s appearance, which in turn completed the altar in the corner of the lab. In that stark and white-gray environment surrounded by dismantled timepieces Carlos’ Dia de los Muertos altar was a splash of sunset colors, warm candle-light, and the sweet aromas of fresh bread and incense, set off by the muted sobbing of the flowers.

“Seriously. You really only have one Day of the Dead per year where you come from?” Cecil’s brow furrowed at the thought, the forehead creases crow’s-footing his third eye. “Is that adequate?”

“It serves.” Carlos looked at this other vivid splash of color in his life, the man who was the voice of this strange little town – both of which had against all odds made their way into his heart. “We remember our dead, and tend their graves. Since the … since his burial site is a municipal secret, I can’t tend his grave so I’ll remember him with the altar.”  He exhaled a laugh. “Cecil, I don’t even know his real name.”

“None of us did,” Cecil responded matter-of-factly. “I called him The Indian Tracker on the air the first time I mentioned him, and he called to correct me, very emphatically, that it was The Apache Tracker. I began to tell him which First Nations people actually wore eagle-feather war-bonnets – none of which were Apache – and he hung up on me. God, he was such an asshole.” His brow furrowed again, crinkling all three of his eyes (their violet color startling and beautiful against his black skin). “He was a racist jerk. And he was a good man.”

“He would have been a better man if he hadn’t been a racist jerk,” Carlos said. “But the fact is that I owe him my life.”

Thin dark arms went around Carlos from behind – just the normal two arms everyone was supposed to have, and covered with the luminously-glowing tattoos that adorned his lover. Cecil said nothing; he did not have to.

Carlos smiled and squeezed one forearm (and did not imagine a tickling touch from one of the curious tentacle tattoos). “Dia de los Muertos is to remember dead family members. In many cultures, saving someone’s life makes you responsible for that life or part of that person’s family from then on. Family can be … difficult. You honor and love family, even when there are difficulties or character conflicts.”

He felt Cecil’s nod against his back. “In Night Vale, it’s usually best to die if you save someone’s life – there’s just so much paperwork to fill out afterward.”

Carlos burst out laughing and squeezed both arms. It was just so perfectly in keeping with this place. “Well, he was certainly spared that.” Solemnity overtook him again; he gazed contemplatively at the self-satisfied smirk on the photograph. A white man appropriating First Nation culture, wearing an unearned headdress from a culture completely wrong for the one he had appropriated, with all the respect of a little boy playing dress-up; the same man who had saved Carlos’ life at the cost of his own. Difficulties indeed. The marigolds sniffled. “My parents’ ancestors have been here for centuries. They survived _conquistadores_ , missionaries, gold-hunters, slave hunters, land-hunters, U.S. cavalry, deporters, bounty hunters, militia men, state troopers and black helicopters. In my great-grandparents’ time, the land they’d lived in forever became an American state, and white immigrants told them to go back where they came from. But they lived. They stayed. And I grew up wanting only to know why everything worked the way it did, and thrilled to come back here to solve a scientific mystery.” He smiled, to match the smirk on the photo. “And that, _mi_ _amigo_ , is a lot more impressive than ‘ancient Indian magicks’ that you probably pulled from some white New Age website.”

“Sometimes,” Cecil said, in the intonation that rolled through the studio and out over the desert community, the calm guiding voice of this bizarre town, “balance needs to be realigned. In your life as well as in your car. Perhaps there is someone in your life, who is a mockery of your very existence. An imperfect double, as it were. Perhaps some day balance will be achieved, and the false dies so that the truth can live. Perhaps that is why The Apache Tracker did what he did.”

“Maybe.” Carlos looked at the altar. “Except that no one moved when I was first attacked – not The Apache Tracker, not Teddy Williams, nobody. I didn’t blame them, Cecil – if I’ve learned nothing else from my year here, it’s that there are so many ways to die in Night Vale the smartest thing is to hold still and hope the pterodactyl or cloud or tiny army gets someone else.

“But I heard something, even over your voice on the bowling alley’s intercom. I heard everyone gasp when you began to cry on the air. That sound hurt me worse than the little missiles.”

He felt Cecil’s face grow instantly warmer where it was pressed between Carlos’ shoulder blades. “That was so unprofessional of me. And I stammered. Station Management was not happy.”

Carlos laced his fingers with Cecil’s, and did not flinch when the moon-colored tentacle tattoos snaked out to curl around his wrists and the backs of his hands as well. “And I think it saved me, love,” he said solemnly. “Because only then did The Apache Tracker jump into the pin retrieval area in Lane 5, and rescue me.” He squeezed the fingers to still their slight tremble; the tentacles stroked his wrists.  “Your grief shocked him into reacting. So you were not useless and unable to help after all.”

“So I…” Cecil’s radio voice, so sure and strong, faded and came back. “…I h-helped … save your life.” The radio announcer’s entire body slumped against Carlos’ – surprisingly heavy for such a slight frame.

Carlos’ entire body shook too – with fiercely-suppressed laughter, because he knew a little about this strange and beautiful man he loved so dearly. “It’s all right, Cecil. It’s all right.” He squeezed both hands hard, and playfully shook one of the tentacles a little. “I’ll help you fill out the paperwork.”

“Oh. Oh, that is a relief,” said the Voice of Night Vale.

The Dead Apache Tracker’s photo seemed to smirk at the lovers from his perch on Carlos’ beautiful altar, safe in his other plane of existence or in oblivion, whichever Death brings: _Better you than me, **tovarich**_.

Carlos smirked right back at the photo. _Thanks again, jerk. Don’t think I didn’t notice that you died to save an actual Native American. I won’t forget that. Nor you. Neither of us will._


End file.
